For almost 20 years, you could watch the Braves nearly every day of the week from April to September on WTBS. Because of this, longtime owner Ted Turner billed the Braves as "America's Team." And he wasn't that far off.

Even after Major League Baseball forced teams to air the majority of their games on regional -- as opposed to national -- networks beginning in the mid-to-late 1990s, you could still watch a good number of Braves games locally on TBS or Fox Sports South. But TBS eventually stopped airing regular-season Braves games altogether, and that's where the trouble began for local cable TV subscribers.

The Braves began splitting their broadcasts between Fox Sports South, Peachtree TV and SportSouth, the first two of which were available locally on Cable One. But as the years have passed, the team has -- for whatever reason -- began shifting more and more games to SportSouth.

If you're a satellite television subscriber, you're still in the clear. Both DirecTV and DISH Network carry SportSouth, Peachtree TV and Fox Sports South, so you can still watch every Braves game even if you have to search a little to find them sometimes.

But if you're a Cable One subscriber, you're mostly out of luck. Cable One has never locally carried SportSouth (which has the rights to 81 Braves games this season), but has also dropped Peachtree TV (which has 25 more) starting this year after that network began instituting a surcharge for carrying Braves broadcasts, Cable One Pascagoula general manager Cindy Byrd said.

"The channels we carry are determined sometimes by region, but also by cost," Byrd said. "And at Cable One, we've tried really hard to keep costs down."

That leaves many local Braves fans with only the Sunday afternoon Fox Sports South game to watch most weeks. (If the Braves are being shown on one of the national networks, such as ESPN or Fox, then those games are also available on Cable One).

MLB considers southeast Mississippi part of the Braves' television territory, but with Chicago-based WGN America broadcasting more than 60 Cubs and White Sox games this year, it's actually easier to find those teams on Cable One than it is the "home" team. That's ridiculous. And satellite TV is not a viable option for everyone.

Byrd said Cable One has no plans to add SportSouth to its channel lineup, or to begin carrying Peachtree TV games again. That's ultimately a business decision, but a disappointing one for local Braves fans who want to be able to watch their team play more than once a week.

Contact Creg Stephenson at cstephenson@themississippipress.com. His column appears on Thursdays in The Mississippi Press.